Will you marry me, Paul Krugman?

I was in the middle of one of those pretentious-yet-depressing conversations that can only be had by a bunch of liberal graduate students living under a Republican administration about to take us into an ill-advised war.

"You know," my computer scientist friend said, "I wouldn't be opposed to this war in principle if I just trusted Bush to get the job done right — to rebuild Iraq afterwards, to establish real democracy there, that sort of thing. But look what he's doing in Afghanistan. While offering the Turkish government almost $30 billion in loans and grants to get it to ignore popular opposition at home and join up against Saddam, the Bush administration didn't include any money in its proposed budget for rebuilding Afghanistan. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Congressional staffers had to pencil in $300 million at the last minute, and even that's nowhere near enough to prevent Afghanistan from plunging back into chaos, and sending more terrorists our way."

"You read Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times today, didn't you?" I replied.

"Yeah, I always do, and I always find myself repeating his ideas as if they were my own. It's weird, reading Krugman's columns always makes me feel so depressed, but I keep reading them anyway. And I love reading them, for some reason."

"The man is the only true existentialist of our age — the Camus of columnists, the Beckett of the beltway. He paints the world as this horribly grim place, and we can't stand the pessimism, but we can't tear ourselves away. He's just that good."

"Well, right now, the world really is this horribly grim place. You just have a lot of Republicans trying very hard to convince us that it's not. And at times it seems Krugman is the only one who sees through the b.s., who's willing to call Bush a liar when he lies, and an idiot when he does something idiotic."

"Plenty of people are calling Bush a liar. It's just that they're all so shrill, and so clichéd, the usual suspects of the ever-activist left. You have no reason to trust them, any more than you have reason to trust the French. But Krugman's different. He doesn't ever even really call Bush a liar or anything. He just points out the administration's obvious errors, its clear falsehoods, and provides you with the irrefutable evidence that the Bushies are in the wrong. It's everything Fox News claims to be, and isn't: he reports, you decide. But the decision is so obvious, when it comes to Bush..."

"That's why they're out to get him. I heard there was some guy posting at 'Google Answers' that he'd pay for dirt on Paul Krugman, beginning with $50 for basic background info and making its way up from there. But someone told Krugman, and he just posted all this info about himself on his website, and asked for the money himself. God, I love that man."

"Dude, we should send him some flowers or something. Something tasteful but grim, like a funerary arrangement or something. He's the best thing we have going for us at Princeton right now."

"Yeah, while the Times has this picture of this sad-but-dignified handicapped woman on the cover of its magazine section, with a story on the inside about how Peter Singer wants to kill and eat her or something, Paul Krugman is out there biweekly spreading word of Princeton's good name worldwide."

"Man, I love that guy."

"So why don't you marry him?"

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"Dude, I totally will."

Paul Krugman, if you're reading this, I am hereby asking for your hand in marriage. I know the university frowns on faculty-grad student relationships, but frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. All is fair in love and war.

Mike Frazer is a graduate student in the Politics Department. He is from the Bronx, N.Y.